Westminster Abbey Looks Like New

An English primer

July 4, 1993|By Craig R. Whitney New York Times

LONDON — With its great west front surrounded by a latticework of scaffolding for much of the past few years, Westminster Abbey has long looked like a building that was still under construction, though it's seven centuries old.

But with a 20-year restoration of the external stone of the vast structure finally beginning to draw to a close, the scaffolding has come down, revealing an astonishing white facade whose every detail stands out brilliantly, after years of crumbling away under acid rain and black 19th-century soot.

Like Notre Dame in Paris, the abbey is one of the world's great French Gothic buildings. Its patron, Henry III, and his master mason, Henry de Reyns, were clearly inspired by the buildings at Paris and Rheims when they designed the replacement of the existing Romanesque abbey in the mid-13th century. The architects prized the soaring vaults and clean lines of the French models of the era, though the purity has been cluttered up inside by the many monuments to English history that tourists come to see today.

The restoration - and clean-air legislation that has banned the burning of coal or wood in London's city limits - have allowed the abbey to be reborn. A building that generations of visitors probably thought always had been black is emerging as something else altogether, in gleaming ocher and white limestone.

The external restoration will have cost about $48 million by the time it is finished in 1995. The nave and the two transepts are clean. And the west front - the tallest in Britain at 225 feet from the tips of the towers that Sir Christopher Wren finally had built to the base - is mostly clean, though some repair work continues on the lower portals.

Now the last phase of the restoration is under way on the last major addition to the abbey. This is the early 16th-century Henry VII Chapel, a completely Tudor addition to the original French-inspired abbey. The chapel juts like a dark finger from the apse toward the medieval Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament.

Until now, most of the chapel, one of the glories of the uniquely English Perpendicular style of Gothic, has remained pockmarked and blackened as a consequence of the thousands of London fogs in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

''The restoration that has been going on since 1973 of most of the external fabric of the abbey is the most thorough it has ever had,'' said the man who has the job of keeping it in order, Donald Buttress. A bearded North Countryman whose opinions about architecture and the abbey are strong enough to lean up against, Buttress said the work on the Henry VII Chapel was urgently needed and would take most of the next three years.

Last done over in Bath stone around 1820, the chapel's exterior has suffered greatly in the intervening years. The parapets and pinnacles and the fantastical greyhounds, lions and grotesque beasts that the Tudors carved into the tops of the chapel buttresses are worn down and leprous-looking. ''Some of the pollution we're taking off is two to three inches thick,'' Buttress said.

Sulfur in the air combined with moisture in the atmosphere and the stone to eat away at it like cancer, an effect that can be seen in the soft Caenstone from Normandy used in the Henry VII Chapel.

All of the money for the abbey's restoration has so far been privately raised by a committee headed by the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Since the Reformation, the abbey, which was a monastery in the Middle Ages, has been a ''royal peculiar'' directly dependent on the monarch, who is head of the Church of England.

The philanthropist Sir John Templeton has already donated nearly $2 million to the restoration of the Henry VII Chapel, the home of the Order of the Bath. He will be memorialized with a stained glass heraldic window at the west end; most of the original glass was destroyed during the Reformation and in World War II.

The abbey is hoping to raise an additional $3.7 million for the chapel and for the west front restoration from donors in the United States and Canada. Those who want to seize the opportunity to immortalize themselves along with those commemorated in Poets' Corner can do so, with panels of stained glass bearing their names ($150,000 apiece), and nameplates in brass plates in the narthex ($50,000). For $10,000 a donor's initials will be carved into one of 130 of the stone shields, about 6 inches wide, that decorate the outside walls, just above head level on top of the stone foundation.

All, of course, as a token of gratitude for contributing to the cost of the restoration, said the Very Rev. Colin Semper, one of the canons of the abbey, who will take the appeal to the United States this fall with the famous choir of men and boys.

The chapel, originally intended as a shrine to the Virgin Mary, is decorated with a uniquely English fan-vaulted ceiling and a splendid set of 16th-century oak choir stalls, with the flags of the Order of the Bath.